Fedora goes up to eleven

I upgraded to Fedora Core 11 this week, up from 9. What really surprised me is how fast it is. I don’t recall ever having such a noticably faster and responsive desktop after a distro upgrade. Everything is more responsive and instantaneous. Even though FC9 didn’t seem particularly slow, I realize now that I had been spending time just waiting for the software to catch up. I don’t know where the credit is due. Could be anything from the kernel to XFCE to the apps. But I like it.

Normally, most SELinux issues occur when it is enabled. But after the upgrade I ran into one of the opposite variety: the gedit program threw an error on every file save. The 244605 and 477070 tickets might be the same issue I ran into. I worked around the problem by switching to ‘kate -u’.

I need at least four different text editors in order to enjoy using the computer. How could anyone stand the monotony of a single text editor all day? Right now I’m doing:

gvim for detailed things

vanilla vim for when gvim is too awesome.

kate for vogon poetry

jedit for when I get that certain IDE feeling (you know the one)

emacs for inducing carpal tunnel syndrome

It’s also important to switch out text editors at regular intervals, such as when one of them breaks in a distro upgrade.

The first few minutes after booting up a fresh distro install are disorienting. Keyboard shortcuts and other customizations are so much a part of me that I can hardly function at all without them. Thank goodness that it’s only a matter of minutes before /home gets restored and everything is back to normal.

The policy I follow is to upgrade to every odd-numbered Fedora release. I don’t actually know if the even-numbered releases are worse or better, but based on my experience with Star Trek movies, I’m not going to take any chances. The majority of my coworkers run non-Fedora distros, even the ones that used to work at Red Hat. Some of them do RHEL, which I did a few times when I was waiting for an odd-numbered Fedora release.

Although I considered the B-tree FS with its “i-can't-believe-it's-not-btr” kernel option, ext4 won in the end. With the new policy of updating atime only once per day, I’m leaving it enabled. I couldn’t get the nvidia driver to load until I removed nouveau from initrd and downgraded to 173xx.

Overall, FC11 has been a great upgrade. Thanks to Free Software developers the world over.